Ask the experts: Our Paris expert offers advice on the best ways to
visit the Eiffel Tower, including how to get the cheapest admission, and
full details of opening times

The Eiffel Tower is 125 years old this year, and will inaugurate its new-look first floor in October. Here is our Parisexpert's guide to making the most of your visit. For information about where to stay, see our guide to the best hotels in Paris.

Going up the Eiffel Tower

If, like many Parisians, you have never been up, you are missing out. On clear days, the views across the city are incredible - the third-floor viewing platform is higher than that on the 72nd floor of the London Shard. At night the experience is quite different, lit thousands of tiny lights as the whole tower sparkles on the hour while the city glitters below.

Showing that the Iron Lady has life in her yet, a renovated first floor will be revealed this autumn: two new glass-sided pavilions, new energy-saving ecological materials and a scarily vertiginous-sounding glass floor, around the centre, where a glass barrier replacing the old railings allows you to look into the central void. The second level is best for recognising different monuments, the third level is all about bird’s eye distance, plus a champagne bar to celebrate your arrival. And views from the ground give an amazing impression of the sheer size and complexity of the structure itself.

Lift to top: € 15; young people aged 12-24 € 13.50; children 4-11 € 10.50. Lift to second floor € 9.50; young people age 12-24 € 7.50; children 4-11€ 4.50. Stairs to second floor € 5; young people aged 12-24 € 4; children 4-11 € 3. Children under four free.

Advance booking for the Eiffel Tower

Booking in advance for a time slot — every half hour between 9am and 9.30pm — gets priority access to the Eiffel Tower’s sought-after lifts. Print the ticket out or use it on your mobile phone (providing the bar code is readable). All time slots are currently pretty much fully booked for at least the next two months, although the website shows when there are occasional free slots.

The views from the top are amazing. Picture: Alamy

Beware of tickets offered by some websites or tour organisations at almost three times the price: a ticket on the official Eiffel Tower website (www.toureiffel.paris) costs €15 for an adult, a “Skip the Line Eiffel Tower Ticket Only” on getyourguide.com orviator.com (despite the latter’s “low price guarantee” flag) costs € 40, and that’s for all over 4 year olds (with no reduced prices for 4-11s and 12-24s).

Queue beating

If you can’t reserve ahead, or simply want more freedom to choose the day and time when you want to come, then be prepared to queue — the long lines snaking round beneath are all part of the Eiffel Tower experience. The tower gets as many as 32,000 visitors a day in high summer, so even if you arrive before opening time, you won’t be alone. That said, there is more chance of shorter queues at meal times (that famous French lunchbreak), on foggy days, in winter, or late at night when the coach tours have gone. Around 9pm or 10pm can be easier. If you’re coming with small children, try to make sure there are two adults, so that one can take them off to the playground, just behind the tower on the Champs-de-Mars, while the other queues.

Walking up the Eiffel Tower

It’s hard work but the way to really appreciate Gustave Eiffel’s engineering prowess from close up, giving a vision of some of the 18,000 metal elements and 2.5 million rivets that make up the tower, with much shorter queues than for the lifts, although a surprising number of people do choose to walk. There are 704 steps to level two, where it is possible to buy a ticket for the lift up to level three.

It is possible to climb to the top, but there are 1,665 steps. Most people take the lift. Picture: Alamy

The restaurants

Another (expensive but delicious) way to beat the queues is to reserve a table at Le Jules Verne restaurant (www.lejulesverne-paris.com), 125 metres up on the second floor, and served by its own lift on the south pillar. Now part of the Alain Ducasse empire, with a few witty references on the menu (a chocolate bolt pudding), it is more relaxed than many gastronomic restaurants, as diners rush off to take snapshots, but don’t wear the shorts and tee-shirts of other tower visitors. Lunch menu from €98, dinner menu from €185.

You can also reserve for the less-exclusive 58 Tour Eiffel on the first floor at 58 metres, given a slick makeover by Patrick Jouin a couple of years ago and taken into the Ducasse fold. At lunch, meals are served in a “picnic-style” basket (with internet reservation 11.30am, 1.30pm €40.50; without reservation 11.30am-4.30pm), for dinner, it’s a smarter brasserie-style meal (with internet reservation only 6.30pm or 9pm, from €80, child under 12 €25.50). Reservations include the lift to the first floor, collect the ticket from the restaurant kiosque between the north and east pillars.

View from 50 metres (and 284 steps) up of the “grand perspective” down the Champs-Elysées through the Tuileries gardens to the Louvre and in the other direction to the Grande Arche de la Défense, but above all the hypnotic vision of the cars milling about below. €9.50; under-18s and EU nationals under 25 free.

A fabulous view not so much for its height as the way the city unfolds around you as you go up the sequence of escalators. €10-€12 if you want to see the museum and exhibitions; €3 if you only want the escalator ride.

Historic and atmospheric. You often have to queue here too, though nothing like as long as for the Eiffel Tower. A steep, narrow climb (240 steps) inside the north tower, across the gallery on the west front with the bonus of gargoyles and chimeras, and a second shorter climb (147 steps) up the south tower onto the roof for a view that places you right in the very centre of Paris. €8.50; under-18s and EU nationals under 25 free.

Like Maupassant who visited the Eiffel Tower every day so he didn’t have to see it, here you can avoid looking at this relic of Paris’s 1970s skyscraping ambitions. The lift takes 38 seconds up to the 56th floor viewing lounge with interactive panels and a café, with stairs up to the 59th floor outdoor viewing deck. Lower than the Eiffel Tower but more central - and with the bonus of a view of the Eiffel Tower. €14.50, 16-20 and students €11.50, children aged 7-15 €9.

5. Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

For its free panorama over Paris from the Temple de la Sybille atop a rocky crag.

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About Natasha Edwards

Natasha has lived in Paris for almost 20 years and is a former editor of the Time Out Paris guide.